5 Big Marketing Lessons From Big Companies

Products don’t define your business.  It is the market that establishes it. A brand like Colgate is no longer in the toothpaste business. With a product line that includes dental floss and mouthwashes, they are essentially in the oral healthcare business.

Great brands provide solutions. They do this by giving people what they want. There are plenty of lessons for small business owners from following how large businesses operate.

Follow the Audience

While your target audience may remain the same, their behavioral patterns change all the time. One big change that is evident in the past couple of decades is the shift from traditional media to digital media.

According to Statista, almost 4.66 billion people were active internet users as of July 2020. This figure encompasses 59 percent of the global population, with mobile internet users accounting for 91 percent of total internet users.

As a small business owner, consider shifting your focus to these new-age digital channels to stay relevant. In addition to following where your audience is, these modern marketing tools also offer better tracking and do a good job of controlling your expenses.

Social Media Presence

Social Media is an essential component of any business marketing strategy. It helps brands connect and interact with customers on a daily basis, and this improves customer experience and brand awareness, that, in turn, boosts leads and sales for businesses.

As for users, they consider a brand’s social media narrative an essential part of their whole shopping experience. It adds to the brand’s persona and plays a role in influencing public perception.

Wendy’s Twitter marketing, which caters to the younger generation, is a good example. Their quick wit, out of box humor makes their Twitter handle authentic. And the beauty of their content is that it’s so relatable and consistent. We want more and more and more.

In addition to this, you may also notice that such large organizations are also extremely consistent in their posting schedule. These organizations have exhaustive social media calendars that outline their strategy for the month or the quarter and stick to this schedule.

So how do you apply these lessons to your small business? To begin with, identify your target audience and the kind of content they consume. Also, you may need to identify the public persona for your brand – do you want to come across as a serious and authority in the industry? Or, do you want to take on a friendly tone?

Secondly, invest in social media management tools that can help you schedule several posts in advance so that you can reach your audience consistently.

This decision will help you ace social media better.

Video Marketing

Google and YouTube are the two most used search engines in the world. While it doesn’t seem like it, YouTube is a pretty popular search engine by itself.

It should come as no surprise that video marketing is one of the top priorities for businesses worldwide. It’s not only for the future but very much for the present as well.

People wish to consume content that offers them some kind of value. In turn, if they find this content useful, they share it with their friends and family.

Moreover, they want to see product-related videos before they buy the product or service you offer. It is these videos that build trust and further boost conversion and sales.

And did I mention it already that Google loves videos? As such, it becomes essential for brands to pile on the valuable video content.

Analyze the data

One thing that is common to all the biggest startups in the world is how intently they process and analyze their user data.

The most valuable metric to have today is customer data. The information you possess about your customer is directly proportional to your wealth. As such, understanding the customer becomes critical for success.

The best way to do this is by tracking user behavior because it tells you how they interact with your brand. It gives an insight into the things people are interested in or not.

So, if the prospect liked the content and found it valuable and relevant, they’ll engage with it. But if in case they struggle, get confused, or get stuck, they’ll simply leave. This way, you get a fair idea about your customer’s intent, i.e., what they want and care about.
But how do brands discover user intent? They do this using some tools like Analytics (website analytics), user surveys, etc.

Moreover, brands can investigate the performances of specific pages as well. They can use the A/B testing technique to identify the best possible result of the user’s action.
Brands can also analyze their email marketing campaign’s performance, depending on the email’s open rates, link clicks inside mail, etc.

Therefore, It becomes essential for brands to possess this information. Depending on this knowledge, they can optimize their products and offers to boost sales further.

Amazon, the world’s most successful e-commerce retailer, demonstrates the importance of this emphasis on the user.
The company has repeatedly noted that their obsessive focus on the customer sets them apart and is the factor that enabled them to become the e-commerce legend they are today.

Automate tasks

Large corporations automate. A lot.

This could be everything from automating an email marketing campaign to having robots run your warehouse.

If you are an agency or a small business owner, there are plenty of opportunities to optimize your business through automation. Now is also a good time to invest your resources here since there are practically dozens of tools and applications that can help you automate your business processes and increase productivity – all for just a handful of dollars a month in the subscription.

The cost savings from this is immense, not to mention the potential upswing in revenues.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are plenty of Marketing lessons to be learned from some of the leading brands in the world.

From understanding how they have the first interaction with their customers, how they engage with them, how they track their behavior and personalize their marketing activities for different sets of audiences, it’s a continuous yet enjoyable process to get into.